


Pagliacci

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s10e09 The Things We Left Behind, Gen, Mark of Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 07:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3201419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody loves a clown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pagliacci

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed; please do tell me if I've let a typo or two slip through!

If you gotta fake-laugh at the Stooges, you might as well be dead. Hell, you might actually be dead. Dean’s pretty sure that’s a cosmic truth—the big guy probably inscribed it on a tablet somewhere back in the day, and if he didn’t, well, he was missing out.

So, it’s a good thing Dean fakes it so real even he doesn’t know the difference anymore. (If he ever did, if there ever was one.) He laughs loud enough he knows Sam will hear it out in the kitchen, hard enough that Sam will see his shoulders shaking if he walks past the door. Keeps it up even without anybody in the room to pretend for; knows his lies by heart. The show must go on. 

He learned that lesson early. Before he even learned that there were monsters in the world; before yellow-eyes; before the fire. 

He’d fallen on a Lego and bruised his knee, scrambled to his feet and run over to Mom with a wail all ready to burst out of his mouth. But he’d caught sight of Mom’s face before she saw him. She had this book of photographs open on her knee, and her face was all screwed-up and red, one hand over her mouth, her whole body quaking with these soundless, terrifying sobs. 

There was a photograph of Sammy lying on the arm of the chair, like she’d been about to slip it into the plastic casing and gotten distracted. He was all wrapped up in a blanket, Mom’s exhausted face and Dean’s gap-toothed smile behind him. 

Dean remembered Dad taking the picture, holding up the camera and saying, “Smile!” The light from the flash had hurt Dean’s eyes, but smiling had been easy.

Mom wasn’t looking at that picture, though. She was looking at a picture of a man and a woman, standing in the garden of a house Dean didn’t recognise. The man had a grumpy expression on his face, like how Dad looked sometimes when he was pretending he didn’t want to do something. 

Dean hadn’t recognized Samuel and Deanna, not then. He’d just looked at Mom crying, and he’d forgotten to cry himself. He kind of wanted to go hide, but he wanted Mom to stop crying more, so he’d tugged at her hand and said, “Mom? Mommy?” until she looked at him and her eyes cleared and she stopped shaking.

Her smile was still wobbly, though, so he’d done the only thing he could think of, which was tug her arm again and say, “Be a plane with me?” It always made him happy, so maybe it would make Mom happy, too. 

It worked. They stuck their arms out and chased each other around the den until Sammy woke up and started crying, and by that time, Mom didn’t look like she was gonna cry anymore. Dean fell over again and bumped his knee, and it hurt even worse than before, but this time he didn’t even feel like crying, because Mom scooped him up in her arms and kissed the top of his head and called him her little ray of sunshine.

Yeah, everybody loves a clown.

 

\----

 

Sam shows up with a plate of grilled cheese, and Dean wants to ask what the hell Sam’s doing bringing him sick-people food when he isn’t sick. (Not on the outside, not where anyone can see it.) He keeps his trap shut, though, because the kind of mood Sam’s been in lately, grumbling might lead to awkward attempts at serious conversation. Those are hard to laugh through; hard to get through at all without slamming a fist down on the table and feeling rage pulse red-hot behind his eyes.

Dean grabs the plate, instead, and makes the most obnoxious eating-noises he can muster, never mind that it doesn’t taste good, doesn’t taste bad, doesn’t taste of anything at all. If Sam’s thinking, _Dude, you’re gross_ , at least he isn’t thinking, _Dude, you’re a ticking time-bomb._

Dean doesn’t need anybody else to think that for him.

Sam’s actually doing a good enough job of not hovering too close. It’s just that Dean can sense that he wants to, and that’s dangerous. If—or, be honest, _when_ —Dean goes off, he needs Sam as far out of the blast radius as humanly possible. 

Won’t be easy. Sam’s always been a tough audience to play to. But right now, at least, he seems willing to be convinced. 

He pulls up a chair, fixes his eyes on the laptop screen and only lets them drift over in Dean’s direction a couple times, when he thinks Dean isn’t looking. After a couple minutes, his uneasy smile gives way to a genuine laugh, and Dean relaxes a little. Sitting here like this, it’s almost normal. 

Almost like they’re two ordinary people laughing at a dumb movie; almost like Dean didn’t wake up this morning feeling the ghost of a knife in his hand, tasting copper in the back of his throat.

Almost is as good as it gets, so he keeps smiling.

 

\----

 

Cas calls them, then, and it’s time to take the show on the road.

Hey, Dean’s an old pro at this. Keep smiling; give Cas the _let it go_ talk; tell him what he’s gonna have to do between a grin and a bite of stolen burger.

Cas might even be a tougher sell than Sam, with the flat-out questions and the whole what-is-this-human-bullshit squinty-eyes thing, the way he’s obviously too tired to be anything but sincere right now. The weariness that greets Dean’s _I’m great_. 

Dean wouldn’t have the luxury of getting into it even if he wanted to. He can’t let Cas reassure him, hold out false hope like a lifeline. He knows where that road leads. 

So he says, _I can’t be that thing again_ , and he doesn’t say, _I’m scared that I can and I’m scared that I will and I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared_ , and then he stuffs his mouth full of burger so he can’t say anything at all.

 

\----

 

Claire splits, and Cas’s face falls, and then they’re sitting in a bar doing the whole life-sucks-but-it-sucks-less-with-whiskey thing—and that’s fine, that’s the kind of coping mechanism Dean can get behind. 

“Hey,” Sam says, then. “Tell him about that time in New York.”

There’s just a nanosecond of uncomfortable twisting in Dean’s guts, before his front brain kicks in and reminds him that yeah, this is his comfort zone. Fronting the crap with a grin until everybody’s laughing.

He wouldn’t have been able to tell the truth at the time, even if he’d wanted to. Wouldn’t have known how. Still doesn’t, maybe, because this is his automatic mode: he clicks into gear, and then it’s 100MPH down Bullshit Highway.

So he laughs and tells the story like he has a hundred times before. Starring Dean Winchester as the dumb teenager, drunk off his ass and getting busted in front of all his cool new friends; John as the Dad who’s such a badass that those cool new friends look just about ready to piss their pants with fear when he shows up. 

“I’m not quite sure what was in that stuff,” Dean throws in, and he isn’t even sure why he does it—except maybe to reassure himself that Sam won’t pick up on it, that he’ll hear the story the same way he has every other time, the way Dean means for him to hear it.

Sure enough, he does. There’s a faint, curious slant to Cas’s gaze, but he doesn’t push it, either. Which is to be expected, with the kid he seems to have decided to adopt having told him to go fuck himself, and probably for the best. Dean sure as hell isn’t up for explaining that shit.

He isn’t sure he even understood, back then. He knew it wasn’t really getting busted that got to him, had him slamming doors and acting out like he never would’ve dared sober. It wasn’t even the puking—though the sensation of mostly-alcoholic sick burning its way out through his nose is something he’s never managed to scrub from his memory.

It was the way Dad didn’t even yell at him at first—not that he needed to. Just said, “You need to be more careful than this,” and kept his eyes carefully on the road, didn’t look at Dean. 

There was something in how he said, _You_. Something more than, _You’re a hunter, I raised you to know better than this, act like it_. It made Dean feel uneasy, somehow. Stripped bare, less like a hunter than like something small and trembling in a snare. He found himself picturing the laughing faces around the table in the club, seeing monsters in their grins. 

So he spat out a petulant _I hate you_ that just made him sound even more pathetic, and the next day he sulked in the backseat all the way across state lines. 

Soon enough, Dad found something else to yell at him about, and now Dean makes people laugh when he tells the story, and he never gets drunk unarmed.

 

\----

 

He’s been doing it forever. Dazzle ‘em with a grin and don’t talk about it. For years—back through Crowley and karaoke, through “Be my Valentine?” and a thousand smirks aimed at a thousand waitresses and a thousand more jokes about Sam’s hair, right back to Mom crying over a photograph album when he was four years old.

It isn’t like Dean’s perfect at it. There are spots where he’s worn thin, where his insides show through. Moments when he breaks apart and feels like it might be forever. 

Still, he always gets himself together. The show always goes on.

The Mark, though. It doesn’t need weak spots. He could be made of stone and it would probably still win, crack him apart like a tree growing through a paving slab. It’s gonna pull down the curtain and the lighting rig, set fire to the theatre and mow down the crowd like a scythe. One of these days.

And somehow when Salinger stumbles out of the bedroom and smashes a bottle over his head, he knows. 

Today. It’s over. He just knows.

He tries. He plasters on the cocky-asshole bravado one last time, cracks something like a smile and tries to say, “You don’t wanna do this” like it’s a threat and not a plea.

But it’s over.

Almost a relief, in the end. When he’s on the floor with a bloody knife in his hand and the taste of copper in the back of his throat, and Sam takes his face in both hands and begs him for a comforting lie.

He doesn’t have any left. Nothing to carry him. Nothing to carry.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says, and the curtain’s down, and he shakes so hard it feels like laughing.


End file.
